GCN 44777: GRB 260601B/EP260601a: J-band upper limit with WINTER

Geoffrey Mo (Caltech/Carnegie), Tomas Ahumada (NOIRLab), Benjamin Schneider (LAM), Robert Stein (UMD), Viraj Karambelkar (Columbia), Danielle Frostig (CfA), Nathan Lourie (MIT), Robert Simcoe (MIT), and Mansi Kasliwal (Caltech) report:

We observed the field of GRB 260601B/EP260601a (Yang et al., GCN 44766; Yu et al., GCN 44767; Wang et al., GCN 44768; Waratkar et al., GCN 44771; Sugita et al., GCN 44773) in the near-infrared J band with the Palomar 1-m telescope, equipped with the 1.2-square degree WINTER camera (Lourie et al. 2020, Frostig et al. 2024). 

Observations began at 2026-06-02T11:12:20 UTC in the J band (~16 hr after the GRB trigger), consisting of 15 x 120 s exposures. The images were processed using the WINTER data reduction pipeline implemented with mirar
 (https://github.com/winter-telescope/mirar, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13352565). 

We do not detect a source at the optical counterpart location (Liu et al., GCN 44764; Guelfand et al., GCN 44765; Li et al., GCN 44769). We obtain the following 5-sigma upper limit: J = 18.8 mag (AB).

WINTER (Wide-field INfrared Transient ExploreR) is a partnership between MIT and Caltech, housed at Palomar Observatory, and funded by NSF MRI, NSF AAG, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.